Our Opinion: Delivering red wine to reduce red ink

News Tribune editorial

Online competition and health care costs threaten to do what “neither rain, nor sleet nor gloom of night” has accomplished.

The U.S. Postal Service — whose workers brave the aforementioned elements to complete “their appointed rounds” — is tempest-tossed in red ink.

The agency lost $16 billion last year. That’s a lot of money to recoup one “Forever” stamp at a time.

The postal service is a constitutional creation that seems assembled from diverse elements of governing. It is an independent agency of the federal government, but receives little direct taxpayer assistance. In addition, it must ask Congress — pardon the pun — for its stamp of approval to change operations.

But change it must to avert an additional $15 billion in losses anticipated this year.

Those losses are attributed to competition — including online bill payments — and a congressional requirement that it make advance payments to cover health care costs, more than $11 billion last year, for future retirees — a requirement that no other federal agency, including Congress itself, faces.